Category: COVID-19

‘A Moment of Revelation’ by a Diocesan priest

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The other day I was advised that I needed a routine chest x-ray (not COVID-19 related). The nearest available hospital was in the centre of Leeds.  Driving myself into the business of the city from the outskirts was a bit of a novelty.

Until the March lockdown, I had enjoyed an active priestly life which involved ministry to an enclosed community of religious sisters, prison chaplaincy and some committee work but not parish involvement.  I live, therefore, in an independent flat. I am 74 years old and preparing for retirement in August. I am the owner of 2 arterial stents, 3 by-pass arteries and more recently a cardiac pacemaker.

As a vulnerable older person I was instructed to self-isolate in my home. It has made obvious sense for me to keep the rules. Other than daily exercise and the odd minor infraction, I have stayed at home, isolated from the general commerce of daily life. Even my shopping has been done by two very kind friends.

Thus a trip into Leeds was a novelty which at first felt quite daunting. However I soon got into the swing of it. Everything went well and it was the most straightforward outpatient appointment, I think I have ever had. It felt good to become again part of daily life with nurses, doctors and patients all moving about their business as if they were nothing too unusual happening in the world.

As I drove back I tuned in to radio 5L, as I have so often done in times past. And then suddenly, as if the clock had been turned back, I experienced a strange and powerful feeling of being young and energetic again. It quite startled me to realise that three months of isolation and constant news bulletins of sickness and death had imperceptibly given me a sense of having aged.

That revelatory experience has caused me to ponder and wonder what might be the connection between isolation and a sense of ageing.

One of the things I have struggled with during enforced separation from the world, is a sense of purpose. What is the meaning of life if one is all locked up and nowhere to go! What should I do with the day. Like everyone, in the beginning I busied myself with emptying an overflowing in-tray and answering overdue correspondence. But gradually when most of those loose ends were dealt with the question surfaced  – “what is it all about Alfie?” this life locked in doors.

Then the words of Jesus to St. Peter after the resurrection began to resonate.     “But when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will   put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go. “

Though I am blessed with my faculties, both physical and mental, I seem somehow, during isolation, to have lost some independence. Now I must wait for the Government to tell me what is safe and what is not safe, what I can and what I mustn’t do. The belt feels to have been tied around me.

Seeing, each morning, the younger residents of the complex of flats where I live, setting off to gainful employment, seeing the key workers organising things in the supermarket car park opposite and watching the delivery men and the refuse collectors keeping the wheels of life turning, made me feel as though I do not quite belong to the world.  It has created a sense of separation with a resulting sense of unimportance!

It would appear that these three personal experiences of self-isolation have unwittingly left me feeling older.  It makes me wonder will I retire well, – a very pertinent question since my retirement may very well proceed my liberation from lockdown.

What I am very conscious of is that my admiration for the many housebound people older or younger, who manage to stay young at heart, has grown. It is to them I must turn for wisdom and guidance so that lockdown doesn’t rob me, prematurely of a youthful outlook.

‘The Blessing U.K.’ plus ‘The Blessing – KIDS’

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Whether you have seen it already or not, this moving song collaboration is bound to lift your spirits – an amazing coming together of over 65 churches and movements across the U.K. which has had over 3 million views on Youtube.

This is the message they attached: ‘At this unique and challenging time in the United Kingdom over 65 churches and movements, representing hundreds of others, have come together online to sing a blessing over our land. Standing together as one, our desire is that this song will fill you with hope and encourage you. But the church is not simply singing a blessing, each day we’re looking to practically be a blessing…’

And if that wasn’t enough, get the tissues ready before you watch this kids version –

a wonderful rendition by children and young people from the UK, USA, NZ, AUS, SA and many other nations

Lyrics:
Verse:
The Lord bless you
And keep you 
Make His face shine upon you 
And be gracious to you 
The Lord turn His 
Face toward you 
And give you peace 
As we receive, we agree, amen 
Chorus:  Amen, amen, amen 
Bridge:
May His favour be upon you 
And a thousand generations 
And your family and your children 
And their children, and their children 
May His presence go before you 
And behind you, and beside you 
All around you, and within you 
He is with you 
He is with you
In the morning, in the evening 
In your coming, and your going 
In your weeping 
And rejoicing 
He is for you 
He is for you

Original Song “The Blessing” by Cody Carnes, Kari Jobe and Elevation Worship. Written by Chris Brown, Cody Carnes, Kari Jobe and Steven Furtick Audio produced by Trevor Michael Video edited by Level Creative

Is there a better way to die?

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This interesting article from the Guardian explores the subject of drawing up end-of-life wishes and how the virus may be changing our attitude to death.

Peter Hallgarten, who survived a serious case of coronavirus. He and his wife decided 10 years ago to put together their end-of-life wishes (living wills), including a DNR (do not resuscitate order).

The article sates: ‘…Suddenly, death is all around … Everyone knows someone who has been touched. As a result, people are not only having intimations of their own mortality; more of them are thinking about how they want to die; of what they want to avoid in the way of intervention and what they would hope for, too, given the choice. Interest in advance directives, the documents often referred to as living wills, has grown dramatically during the pandemic….’

Read the Article

For more information on end-of-life wishes and related issues, see the websites below:

Find out about ReSPECT, a process which creates a personalised recommendation for your clinical care in emergency situations
A Catholic website with many useful articles about the end of life.

New Grief and Loss Service

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A new support and advice service is being launched to help people across West Yorkshire and Harrogate through grief and loss.

‘Practical and emotional support and advice is available from 8am to 8pm, 7 days a week via our freephone number 0808 1963833, or online chat facility. Our team can offer support and help connect you with organisations local to you, who can offer additional help where needed’.

The free service, commissioned by West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership, will be delivered by West Yorkshire and Harrogate Independent Hospices Consortium, Bradford Counselling Collaborative and Leeds Mind.

Do contact the service if you:

  • are suffering any form of grief and loss
  • are worried about losing someone, whether this relates to a family member, friend or member of their community
  • have been unable to see a loved one in their illness or final days
  • are feeling impacted by the volume of deaths across the country or other aspects of the virus
  • suffering loss not directly linked to the virus

Ring for free on 0808 1963833

Contact through the online chat facility

Update on re-opening of churches

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On 23rd June the Prime Minister stated that places of worship are now able to resume collective acts of worship from 4 July. However, this means putting in place many measures to keep people safe and not all churches will be able to hold Mass at the moment.

Click HERE for a letter from the Archbishops in England which states ‘We welcome this news with great joy’, but cautions ‘we tread carefully along the path that lies ahead’.

It goes on to explain:

‘It is important to reaffirm that, at present, the obligation to attend Sunday Mass remains suspended’. 

‘Please be aware that there will be a limit on the number of people who can attend Mass in our churches. This will determined locally in accordance with social distancing requirements. We therefore need to reflect carefully on how and when we might be able to attend Mass. We cannot return immediately to our customary practices. This next step is not, in any sense, a moment when we are going ‘back to normal’. We ask every Catholic to think carefully about how and when they will return to Mass’.

For up to date guidance from the Diocese, please click HERE.

Bishop Marcus Stock states:

‘Although there is a deep desire to resume the sacramental life of the Church, many parishes will need some time to assimilate the guidance and to put the necessary framework of procedures in place before they can open.’

‘More detailed information about when and how our churches may re-open for public worship – and, crucially, how to book, as numbers are still strictly limited – will be available from individual parishes and/or published on parish websites‘ – please see your own parish for details.

LITURGY IN TIMES OF VIRUS by David Jackson

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In his April pastoral letter, Bishop Marcus writes: ‘Liturgy means a “common work of the Catholic Church… the participation of the People of God in the ‘work of God’. The liturgy is “the source and summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed…the font from which all her power flows.”’ We can all bring to this conciliar description, our own memories of mass-going. At my age, ripened by mass going and ‘serving on the altar’, I come from memories of using a Knox missal in the 1950s (the smell of its pages lingers yet!), to mass with an iPad. No smell left!

I think my understanding of the richness of the ‘liturgy’ as the ‘common work of the Church’ has been immeasurably enriched lately by a realisation of two other parallel more personal ‘works’ which link us to the Church’s liturgy so that its  full power to transform us may be unleashed.

What are these two experiences?  In ‘Novo Millennio Ineunte’, (Entering the New Millennium) Pope St John Paul described worship as ‘contemplating the face of Christ’ A beautiful image. As an impressionable youth, I now see that I confined the ‘face of Christ’ to His ‘real presence’ in the liturgy of the Eucharist. I ignored the Catechism answer to the question: ‘Where is God?: ‘God is everywhere’. A slick answer which left the conundrum intact, my own experience disengaged.    

The Holy Spirit now tells me that the ‘face of Christ’ can be found in two intertwined places: in the depths of my own heart, in the hearts of all others and in the spaces between us. Secondly, I can recognise the face of the ‘universal Christ’ in the whole of creation.

I laughed and played as a boy with pals and fell in love with woods, dales, rivers and the life of birds and flowers. But I never made the link from these to that holiness I had been taught was to be found only in ‘going to church’. Perhaps this had to come later. But our human history, story, myth, poetry and song have been records created by those ‘seers’ and mystics who discovered the face of God ‘everywhere’!

The parables of Jesus jump out from a close natural insertion into and empathy with a divine-soaked interplay between the natural and human, and hence divine, world. The fig, the mustard tree, the vine, sheep, sowing seed, sweeping the house, stewardship, work – all both reveal and hide the Kingdom of God. We note ‘treasure’ but miss noting where the treasure is hidden – in a field!  Fields can both hide yet reveal God!  The bread and wine of the Last Supper meal presume a felt sense of the divinity in all things and all things human – deliverance, freedom, human dignity – a sacramentality prior to but meant to mould our appreciation of the seven.   A discovery of the Universal Christ hidden (pretty well!) in pals and in the whole of nature can lie dormant, waiting for the Holy Spirit to judge when we are ready to ‘get it’!  Celebrating these experiences of the ‘real presences’ of the Universal Christ has brought a new perspective and framework to the liturgy and the Eucharist. Older age gifted and blessed with the conviction that everything is holy, nothing is profane unless misused.

Setting our experience of the liturgical sacramental life, in its place in the context of our own sacramentality and ‘sacredness’ and the sacramentality of all created matter, brings a rich experiential new dimension  to the conciliar description of the liturgy as ‘the source and summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed… the font from which all her power flows‘. As members of the Church we strive to see the Mass as such.

As individuals, we struggle to bathe in the ever-flowing font or fountain of love which is the Trinity present in and as our very being and in and as all things,  Finding, acknowledging and ‘contemplating the face of Christ’ deep in our own hearts and in every morsel of the creation from galaxy to atom, brings such a transformation to participation in the Church’s liturgy, that it is thereby freed and more able in turn to work its transforming power in us.

We give thanks for the ‘God with us’, the lesson of the Incarnation. In the Holy Spirit, we can see that having joined together into and becoming what we eat – the Body of Christ – we are thereby transformed into being ‘missionary disciples’. The ‘work’ of the liturgy urges us to ‘work’ for justice, peace and care for our common home. Liturgy and our mass-going is not simply an end in itself but also the means for our own on-going transformation for a distinct Gospel purpose: to enable us to recognise the real presence, the face of Christ in all, especially in the faces of the poor and in everything. The liturgy brings us back full circle in thanksgiving to Jesus, ‘really present’ in the bread and the wine, prepared by an appreciation of Christ ‘through whom all things were made’ (John: 1: 3) ‘really present’ in the whole of creation.  

Any lessons for a time of lockdown?  We join on-line Eucharists from the Pope in the Vatican, to those in our own Cathedral and parish churches. These celebrations can be framed and supported by the immediacy of meeting and giving thanks for the permanent presence of Christ in our hearts, in the hearts of all and in all our now heightened appreciation of the first book of creation – nature and our place in it. This we can celebrate round our tables, at home, in our meals, in our walks of contemplative silence. 

How can we learn to recognise the ‘face of Christ’ in our own hearts? That is the topic for another time – a contemplative one.

David Jackson. (With thanks and acknowledgement to insights provided by the writings of Julian of Norwich, Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Rohr, Ruth Burrows and many others)

About David

After 9 years as a priest teaching at Ushaw, David left to embrace the equally rewarding ministry of marriage, now to Teresa for some 46 years, blessed by three children and symmetrically 6 grandchildren. He retired in 2011 from being the Diocesan Interfaith Advisor after a career as a RE teacher and inspector for Bradford LEA. He tries now to tie activities round Justice and Peace with eco-care for our common home, all linked to the practice and study of contemplative prayer.  He is a member of Pax Christi and ACTA. He supports Teresa in her voluntary work in Bradford with Asylum Seekers, contact with whom reveals Jesus of the Gospels.  He admires the work of the Columbans, the songs of St Leonard Cohen and all the flights and lives of birds.

David says of himself: ‘I enjoy gardening, reading, walking in the woods, drinking a little too much red wine and watching rubbishy box sets’.  

We are very grateful to David for this insightful piece on Liturgy in these Virus Times.

Loss and Resilience in Older Age

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How can we understand our reactions and responses to the current time?

This coronavirus pandemic is a strange, roller coaster time of ups and downs in our daily lives. We are very likely worried about others and ourselves, on alert, and at the same time want distraction and any good news stories. Maybe our routines and immediate plans are currently up in the air……

Yet we live in the same place with the same view out of the window and with the same community around us. How much of our daily lives have changed and for how long? This coronavirus pandemic will pass. We live in a country with a National Health Service that is free, staffed with skilled hard-working doctors, nurses, carers and other valued, dedicated staff. Staff and supplies are under pressure but we are perhaps relieved we live in the UK.  We will also be concerned about our sisters and brothers worldwide. We are told news every day. This is a mixture (currently in March) of worsening statistics, news stories of dedicated work by medical and local authorities, communities singing and exercising from balconies and lots of other creative ways to stay connected and fit, despite this new term “social distancing.” Some of us are rationing our intake of worrying news. We may also be hearing heart-warming stories and seeing cartoons that make us smile.

Life’s Ups and Downs

Many of us are feeling all kinds of emotions. Some remember previous national and personal hard times. We know from life experience that we have mostly weathered and come through loss of many kinds: family, health, money and work difficulties, ruptured relationships, uncertainties and unexpected challenges. We have also experienced many positive aspects in our lives, and more to come!

And… we have got through to where we are now. Some have had a lifetime of raising families, years of work, acquiring skills and knowledge, having periods of happiness and fulfilment and may on the whole be mostly satisfied about the small and large contributions we have made, and in some ways continue to make to others.

However, at present we may find our mood and outlook changes during the day so that we are experiencing ups and downs. I have just spoken to my 90 year old mother a hundred miles away. She spent the morning reading (in her view) a depressing newspaper article about future country finances and then sat in the sunshine in her garden enjoying the flowers. This morning I felt anxious listening to the news, but then listened to The Archers and went out for my daily walk and saw the daffodils, looking colourful and beautiful whatever is going on around them despite the earlier floods. They flower every year whatever is happening!

We may be worried about our families and friends. Are they well? Will they stay well? Will we manage to get our food and other requirements? Will those unable to work have enough money to manage, jobs to go back to and have time and space for their children to do some schoolwork, have some fun and ways of releasing their energy? Will teenagers and others facing external exams be supported through the next few months and through the next academic and life changes in their lives?

And how do we find peace and distraction when we need that? We have the wisdom and experience of older age to know how we cope in difficult times. Perhaps we pray more and find our religious belief helpful and then we can cry out in our own way: why is this happening to me and to them? Sometimes we doubt our religious faith. Do we have the resilience to cope with this uncertainty? How long will this last? Will we stay well?

I worked for many years supporting people through bereavement and loss, and to a limited extent I still do! You may wonder why I am mentioning loss. We may currently be fearing loss or bereavement or worry about change and having to live a different life for the moment. Our routines and networks are disrupted. We may be grieving for the freedom to go out and meet others or have visitors calling round. We wonder about people’s jobs, and anxieties about paying bills, rents and mortgages, Perhaps we have “lost” our peace of mind?

 A Loss, Change and Bereavement Model

One of the most useful, enduring bereavement and loss models, in my view, is from Stroebe and Schut that focuses on how we each individually may respond to loss, bereavement and change, including a changed perception of our current life and the world around us. You may be familiar with it. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t. After many years of offering it to people I have learnt a number of points:

  1. You are the person who knows best how you think and feel and you are the expert in that, even if at times it doesn’t seem like that. Others can try to empathise with how you think and feel. 
  2. There are two main types of responses we may find we are using, as follows:

a) FEELINGS – You may respond to loss, change and bereavement by feeling sad, panic, angry, guilty, disorientated and experience a number of emotions. You may be very aware of feelings and trying to work through your emotions of loss.

b) MANAGING & PLANNING – You may be someone who manages loss, bereavement and the perception of a changing world by trying to plan and manage it, allowing yourself to plan for the future, be distracted and sometimes even deny to yourself it is happening.

3.  Neither of these ways are either right or wrong – the way of feeling the emotions, or the way of planning a way through – they are both alright and are just how they are.

4. We are all different but you may encounter some difficulty if you get stuck  either with only feeling the feelings or only trying to cope and plan too much.

5. We usually learn to oscillate, move between, expressing emotion and working towards a future. So, a mixture of both a) feeling the feeling and b) managing the situation towards the future is needed, so this is not an “either/or” but a “both and” way of dealing with our lives. That is why it can seem like a roller coaster experience: up and down.

We all have our existing losses and now with Coronavirus we are dealing with the anxiety of the immediate future. This can compound the feeling of loss for us depending on the losses we are already experiencing.

Resilience

An important point to offer is that those working with people who are experiencing the challenges and positives of everyday lives often use the word resilience. Here resilience isn’t defined as being brave and positive all the time. What is meant here, in my view, is that a resilient person is one that can hold the difficult and positive stuff together and continue in their lives.

We all have ups and downs but in older age we have usually realised that we have come through a lot of life and can hold what we have experienced from the good times and the challenging experiences at the same time. So we are usually quite resilient even when it doesn’t feel like it!

Let us keep supporting each other through this in whatever way we can. When this corona virus time comes to an end we can look back together and see how we came through!

Pippa Bonner March 2020

‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you’ – a helpful booklet

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We have produced a short booklet containing both practical information, tips for coping with our current situation, and prayers and poems to uplift and encourage.

Recognising that many older people may not have email or are less familiar with using the internet, here at GOG we decided to put together this colourful booklet and have sent it out to nearly 200 people on our contact list, for whom we had no email details, only a physical address. Our hope is that this will bring some small blessing to those who receive it through their letterbox.

You can also view, download, share or print an A4 version of this booklet below:

Download Printable Booklet (Catholic version)
Download printable Booklet (General version)

There are two versions – one that is more suitable for those connected with the Catholic church (Catholic version) and the second which has less specific Catholic content but still includes prayers and scripture (General version).

PLEASE NOTE: this printable version is designed so you can print it off yourself on A4 landscape and staple it at the left hand corner or left hand side, (as most of us do not have a long arm stapler to staple a booklet in the middle!)

Why not print it off and send it to a friend who would benefit from some encouragement and help at this time?

Alternatively, send a link to this page by email or Whatsapp to your friends and family.

If you would like to reproduce this booklet yourselves to distribute in hard copy A5 booklet form, please contact Rhoda at growing.old.gracefully@dioceseofleeds.org.uk for the original artwork.

In addition, if you would like to add your own organisations’ details to the back of the booklet before distributing, or work with us on an amended version for your area, please be in touch with Rhoda – we are more than happy for this to be a blessing to people in other networks and areas.

Holy Week at Home

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Remembering the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ is of paramount importance to all of us as Christians, and this year we doing this in unfamiliar circumstances; but God is not limited by walls, or any other physical restrictions – He will draw near to us as we draw near to Him.

See our page on ‘Holy Week at Home’ for messages from Pope Francis and Bishop Marcus, together with many useful links

Prayers for our time

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A Beautiful Blessing from John O’Donohue

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
John O’Donohue
Beannacht/Blessing (for Josie, my mother), Echoes of Memory.

Click on THIS PAGE on his website to hear John reading this blessing, and others

A Coronavirus Prayer

Loving and healing God,
We turn to you in prayer,
confident that you are with us and with all people in every moment.
We stand before you as a people of hope,
trusting in your care and protection.
May your faithful love support us
and soothe the anxiety of our hearts.
Generous God,
fill us with compassion and concern for others, young and old,
that we may look after one another in these challenging days.
Bring healing to those who are sick
and all who work in our medical facilities.
Give wisdom to leaders in healthcare and governance
that they may make the right decisions for the well-being of people.
We pray in gratitude for all those in our country
who will continue to work in the days ahead in so many fields of life
for the sake of us all. Bless them and keep them safe.
O God of creation and life, we place ourselves in your protection.
May the mantle of your peace enfold us this day and tomorrow.
May all the saints of God, pray for us. Amen.

Lockdown – A Poem penned by Brother Richard

This poem, written and shared on Facebook by Richard Hendrick on 13th March, went ‘viral’ and was shared across the world as it chimed with our hearts in the midst of this crisis.

Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.

But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood
So that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples
are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.

So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.

Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing